Gianni Infantino stunned the world on the eve of the Qatar World Cup when he began a press conference with a bizarre, shape-shifting monologue. “Today I feel Qatari, today I feel Arab, today I feel African, today I feel gay, today I feel disabled, today I feel a migrant worker.”
As he delivered those comments, Infantino was already well on his way to his greatest transformation: from a lowly, Swiss-Italian lawyer into a Fifa president described by Donald Trump as the “king of soccer”.
Infantino’s Doha speech attacked Europeans who were critical of Qatar as the tournament hosts, so the premise of his outlandish introduction was to extend empathy to all minority groups. He claimed he had empathy with them all as he was bullied at school as a ginger, freckled, foreigner who spoke little German. Today, Infantino claims to speak seven languages, including Arabic. His lone recorded stab at Irish was at the Euro 2012 draw, when he tried to wish Ireland good luck by saying “Fáilte”.
Infantino, now 56, was raised by Italian parents in Brig, a small town in the Swiss Alps. He was 12 when Italy won the 1982 World Cup, which he describes as a formative experience. He studied law at the University of Fribourg and then moved into sports administration, becoming secretary general at the International Centre for Sports Studies, which was created by Fifa and is part of the University of Neuchâtel.
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He joined Uefa in 2000, first as director of its legal affairs and club licensing division. Here he committed to the vital but dry bureaucratic work that keeps Uefa’s competitions on the road. He remained largely known only in the football industry until 2007, when he was installed as interim chief executive of Uefa for four months between the reigns of Lars-Christer Olsson and David Taylor.
He then became deputy general secretary – effectively Taylor’s second-in-command – and succeeded Taylor to the top administrative job in October 2009, serving alongside Uefa’s elected president, Michel Platini. Where Platini cut a glamorous figure and looked to be a formidable political operator, Infantino was a bureaucrat, becoming the slightly gauche face of Uefa’s televised competition draws.
These became drawn-out affairs in every sense of the word, and Infantino was recognisable only to the small subculture of football fans who were sufficiently bored or obsessed to tune into these draws on midweek mornings.
Infantino got on with the business of implementing and executing what Platini mandated, which included a system of club spending controls and the spreading of Euro 2020 right across Europe. In a rare and fleeting glimpse of the ego that would be let loose at Fifa, he jokingly said in 2015 that Uefa deserved to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for economics following the implementation of Financial Fair Play.
While explaining the details of these cost controls, he praised the financial husbandry of Arsenal, whose manager, Arsène Wenger, he would later hire as Fifa’s chief of global development.
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Infantino oversaw format changes and competition expansions that later became one of the characteristics of his Fifa presidency, putting in the groundwork for the Uefa Nations League and spreading European qualifier matches across a week to maximise broadcast audiences. He was not automatically in favour of expansion, however, saying in 2012 that Uefa were struggling to find an adequate competition format for a proposed expansion of the European Championships to 24 teams.
Platini, meanwhile, appeared to be in a position to eventually succeed another Swiss administrator, Sepp Blatter, as the next president of Fifa. These best-laid plans were made awry by the shocking FBI raids on the Bar-au-Lac hotel in Zurich in 2015.
Blatter was not arrested, but he was forced to step down, and Platini’s plans to replace him were in tatters by the year’s end when he and Blatter were banned from football for eight years over a “disloyal payment” to Platini in 2011 that was deemed to have breached ethics obligations. Blatter and Platini have been cleared of any wrongdoing by the Swiss justice system, and earlier this year, Platini filed a criminal complaint against Infantino, former Fifa legal director Marco Villiger and former audit committee chairman Domenico Scala, alleging malicious prosecution and influence peddling. Fifa has denied any wrongdoing in their handling of the 2015 case.
Infantino emerged as Uefa’s candidate, promising to run on a manifesto of reform. He travelled the world speaking to delegates, promising to increase their core funding from Fifa. He also proposed expanding the World Cup from 32 to 40 teams, citing the successful expansion of Euro 2016 to 24 teams. He neglected to mention his 2012 comments on the format problems caused by the expansion.
Infantino won the election in February 2016 in advance of Bahrain’s sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa. Later that year, Infantino flew EasyJet to an IFAB meeting in England, signalling the end of Fifa’s years of excess under Blatter. “We are normal people, and we have to behave like normal people,” Infantino told reporters.
A year later, however, Fifa did not reappoint Hans-Joachim Eckert and Cornel Borbely to their independent ethics committee, which the pair said marked the “de facto end of Fifa’s reform efforts”. Miguel Maduro was meanwhile fired from Fifa’s governance committee, and later testified before the House of Commons that Infantino tried to influence his committee’s decision to block Russian deputy prime minister Vitaly Mutko from joining Fifa’s board under statutes pertaining to political neutrality. At the time, Fifa said Maduro’s assertion was “factually incorrect”.
Following their departures, Infantino rose to an unprecedented position of power as Fifa president, thanks in part to canny political sense amid a Fifa governance structure that allows each member an equal vote regardless of their size.
While he ascended as a quintessential Swiss bureaucrat, Infantino has now been deserted by his former colleagues at Uefa and in Europe. His power base is instead in the Global South, to whom he pandered in that infamous Doha press conference by telling Europeans that “they should be apologising for the next 3,000 years”.
If he is to survive as Fifa president, he must continue to play the rest of the world off against the Continent which allowed him to rise to power.
Source: The Irish Times
